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(2014/02/09) Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering
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people, most of them old and living in urban apartments.50 Families had abandoned the city centres for the

beach, while hospitals were short staffed. No-one realised that the region’s worst peacetime disaster was un-

derway. By 2030, the world can expect to see a doubling of heat related deaths.51

But the threat from climate will be at its most acute in the chaotic, sprawling, endless cities of the developing

world.52 Today, 800 million urban dwellers live in slums, and most of them lack proper water, sanitation and

housing.53 By 2030, without rapid economic growth, that number will have grown by 50% or more.54

These cities will be beset by a growing ‘dirty’ environmental burden. At present, 800,000 people die each

year from urban air pollution and many more suffer from ill health.55 Indoor air pollution is prevalent in

slums and shanty towns, where many women cook using wood fuel and dung, often in poorly ventilated ro-

oms.56 Uncollected waste and sewage is another pressing problem, and causes at least as many additional

deaths.57 Slums also tend to be built in the most hazardous places, with little or no drainage, where the risk
from flooding is high.58

Without economic growth and better planning, these problems will steadily worsen, making the future city a

dangerous and unpleasant place to live. The result will be an inevitable wave of crime, social unrest and, at
worst, conflict. Some cities will be simply unable to cope, and will fail in the face of an insupportable social,

environmental and economic burden.

These will be tomorrow’s feral cities. No longer a driver of growth and increasing prosperity, but “a vast col-
lection of blighted buildings, an immense petri dish of both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the

rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that which is attai-

ned through brute power.”59

4.8.3. A New Cosmopolitanism

In the coming years, the need for greater innovation will be great. Cities must:

• Revolutionise their economies, squeezing four or five times as much value out of every tonne of gree-

nhouse gas they emit, and pioneering new ways to meet global consumer demand.64

• Rebuild their infrastructure, investing in new energy and transportation systems, and buildings that are

massively more frugal in their use of resources.

• Develop the political, regulatory, and financial institutions needed to track, control and price national
emissions with sufficient transparency and accuracy to satisfy international standards.

The scale of what’s required goes far beyond developing a few new technologies. Innovation will need to

reach deep into both formal and informal economies, with the latter certain to remain critical in developing
country cities throughout much, if not all, of the twentieth first century.

Climate, meanwhile, will be only one of many challenges that cities face. As we have seen, urban centres of

all sizes will continue to grow at a staggering rate, with population, power and influence shifting steadily
from the developed to the developing world. Resources will be tight, while global systems are likely to strug-

gle under the demands that are placed on them. Even optimists expect the road to 2030 to be a rocky and

uneven one.

Cities must therefore also invest in resilience – the capacity of a system to “absorb disturbance and reorgani-

se while undergoing change.”70 Many of today’s urban centres are brittle and over-centralized, and have

worryingly few reserves. It’s as if citizens believe their city is immune to the impact of climate change, and

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